Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit

by Eliese Colette Goldbach

Looking back, however, the underlying rationale feels obvious. My father had lost so much, and he was afraid of losing more. His angry far-right politics masked the vulnerabilities that pervaded his life, and his guns gave him the illusion of control. He was primed for a man like Trump, who gave credence to his fears. The immigrants were at our borders, and the Muslims were at our doorsteps, and Hillary Clinton had a chokehold on democracy. When Trump told everyone that the next disaster was already upon us, my father was too afraid to ignore the message.

More important, he didn’t let a few bullies take his passion. That’s what made him Cleveland. That’s what it meant to live and work in the Rust Belt, and that’s the thing that Trump got wrong about us. He didn’t see our resilience, and he boiled us down to our worst parts. He viewed industrial workers as a down-and-out people, and he let us believe that being down-and-out was our only identity. He offered us scapegoats and outrage to mask our anxieties, which blinded us to the fact that he was just another rich, powerful man who wanted to gain more power on our backs. He fed us vengeance, and he stoked our anger. He crippled the good in us, which meant that he never really understood the delicate beauty of everything we were fighting to defend.

This man, whom I so loved and admired, had never forgiven the universe for dealing him a shitty hand, and yet he hadn’t done much to turn his hand around. He never forgave his mother for abusing him as a child. He didn’t manage the type 2 diabetes that he had been struggling with for more than a decade. He still had a few years before retirement, but he was jumping from one job to the next, leaving himself unsuccessful in all of them. He took two-hour naps at work. He disappeared at lunch. He insisted on taking too much time off, and he always blamed his managers whenever he got fired. He latched onto right-wing politics, which told him that he was entitled to a good hand. He deserved the right cards. He shouldn’t have to work for the jackpot, which meant that it was someone else’s responsibility to turn his jokers into aces. Bubbling beneath the surface of my father’s sense of entitlement